evidently craved after their company, but they were very shy of him.
Sometimes they let Malcolm bring him into their boat, and condescended
to row him up and down the loch, a mode of locomotion in which he
greatly delighted, for, at best, the shaking of the great lumbering
coach was not easy to him, and he always begged to be carried in
Malcolm's arms till he found how pleasantly he could lie in the stern of
the Manse boat, and float about on the smooth water, watching the
mountains and the shores.

True, he could not stir an inch from where he was laid down, but he lay
there so contentedly, enjoying everything, and really looked, what he
often said he was, "as happy as a king."

And by degrees, with a little home persuasion from Helen, the boys got
reconciled to his company--found, indeed, that he was not such bad
company after all; for often, when they were tired of pulling, and let
the boat drift into some quiet little bay, or rock lazily in the middle
of the loch, the little earl would begin talking--telling stories,
which soon caught the attention of the minister's boys. These were
either fragments out of the books he had read, which seemed countless to
the young Cardrosses, or, what they liked still better, tales "out of
his own head;" and these tales were always the last that they would have
expected from one like him--wild exploits; wanderings over South
American prairies, or shipwrecks on desert islands; astonishing feats of
riding, or fighting, or traveling by land and sea--every thing, in
short, belonging to that sort of active, energetic, adventurous life, of
which the relator could never have had the least experience, and never
would have in this world. Perhaps for that very reason his fancy
delighted therein the more.